WIP: "MicroK8s Testbed" charm

charm
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Hello all,

I have been working on getting up to speed with the new Operator framework, and also have been doing a lot of testing against microk8s, as part of my usual responsibilities as an Engineering Manager on the Juju core team.

To those ends, I’ve made a “microk8s testbed” charm, to automate the process of spinning up a cloud vm, installing microk8s on it, and setting up a juju model on the microk8s cluster.

Code:

My WIP code lives here (this is a personal project at this point – if we decide to formalize it, we’ll move it elsewhere):

https://github.com/petevg/microk8s-testbed

Deploying it

# Install Juju 2.9 rc5
sudo snap refresh juju --channel 2.9/candidate
# or
sudo snap install juju --channel 2.9/candidate --classic

# Boostrap a 2.9 rc5 controller
juju bootstrap <cloud> microk8s-testbed

# Deploy the charm on an adequately specced machine
juju deploy microk8s-testbed --constraints "cores=2 mem=8G root-disk=40G"

Once the machine is up – you can monitor with watch --color "juju status --color", ssh into it:

juju ssh microk8s-testbed/0

… and from within that machine, you should be able to do juju status, where you will see a brand new kubernetes cloud!

Request for feedback

I’d love some feedback on this charm. Namely:

  • Does the approach that I took to the Operator framework make sense?
    • The code is very procedural, and there might be a more elegant way of doing things.
    • Did I pick up on all of the event hooks and syntactic sugar that I could have used?
  • Is this sort of charm useful to you?
    • E.g., would you like to see a microkstack-testbed charm, or a juju dev envrionment charm?
    • I have company paid cloud creds at hand, and work in an Ubuntu environment with a local lxc cloud and virtual MAAS, which makes Juju an intersting tool for setting up, tearing down, and recreating development environments. How does this workflow feel to others?
  • Does juju nesting juju feel weird to you?
    • This is a fairly normal part of my workflow, but I know that it is a bit odd to use a juju client to ssh to a machine where you use another juju client.
    • I can’t think of a “charming” way to register the microk8s cloud with the juju client residing on the host machine, but I wonder if it might be wise to add some external scripting, or a juju plugin, around this.
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